The present invention relates to a vehicle parking control system.
A parking brake is well known as a conventional method of holding a vehicle in a stopped state when it is parked. The parking brake is generally structured from a parking brake main body that is provided on a wheel and a lever member (or a pedal member) that is connected by a cable and is operated by an occupant of the vehicle.
Also, in a vehicle equipped with an automatic transmission, a parking mechanism, which is a lock mechanism that is provided in the automatic transmission, is also well known as a method of holding the vehicle in a stopped state. The parking mechanism functions such that when the shift lever is moved into the Park range (P range), a parking pawl that is connected to the shift lever engages a parking gear that is fixed to an output shaft of the automatic transmission, thereby stopping the rotation of the output shaft and preventing (stopping) the rotation of a wheel of the vehicle, such as a driving wheel that is connected to the output shaft through a rotating member.
Therefore, when parking, the occupant must execute separately the above two methods in order to hold the vehicle in a stopped state. That is, the occupant must move the shift lever into the Park range (P range) to put the parking mechanism into an engaged state and also pull the hand brake, which is the lever member, to put the parking brake into a braking state.
Accordingly, as shown in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. JP-A-2004-243927, a vehicle shift apparatus has been proposed in which the automatic transmission shift lever and the parking brake operate in conjunction. That is, the vehicle shift apparatus mechanically couples the shift lever and the parking brake. Specifically, the vehicle shift apparatus is structured such that the shift lever is connected to a brake cable, and when the shift lever moves to the Park range position from the Reverse range position, which is adjacent to the Park range position, the brake cable becomes taut and the parking brake operates.